I read all 110 presentations from Pulse 2017. Here are my favorites.
I am interested in understanding the latest and greatest in the field of customer support — starting from case management tools (Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc.) to customer success tools (such as Gainsight) and that drew me to Pulse, the largest conference on Customer Success (from Gainsight) that now attracts 4K+ people. This is how the conference has grown over the years.
Some key things I learned:
- For high touch customers, CSM:Customer (CSM is Customer Success Manager) ratio is somewhere between 1:30 to 1:50. That’s a lot! For the rest, it is somewhere between 1:50 to as high as 1:200! In a completely different but analogous scenario (education), teacher:student ratio in public schools in 2014 was 1:16.1 and in private schools it was 1:12.2 (Source: National Center for Education Statistics). If the CSM is asked to effectively manage so many customers, a smart CSM tool becomes even more critical.
- It wasn’t clear if CSMs are comped on renewals which was kinda surprising. I suspect that pre-sales folks take the entire pie on renewal. If that’s really the case, CSM in long run won’t be that effective. I’d think following would make most sense (this is assuming yearly contract)
First Sale: 80% Sales, 20% CSM (you want CSMs to be involved pre-sales as well)
Renewals: 20% Sales, 80% CSM (CSMs do the heavy lifting for renewals)
- LAER (Land, Expand, Adopt, Renew) model from TSIA (Technology Services Industry Association) around customer life-cycle. TSIA is an organization I was recently made aware of (Support groups in tech companies that I spoke with are members of this organization). The model is kinda self-explanatory but good way to structure customer engagement
Ok, so now let’s jump into the presentations:
State of SaaS companies from BVP (PDF)
MUST-READ if you are a startup founder/CEO, investor etc. trying to understand real-life metrics for SaaS companies e.g., how fast do the best SaaS companies growing to $10M ARR (is it 2 years or 4 years.. answer is 2).
How TrueCar turned around based on feedback from Dealers (PDF)
One of the very honest presentations about what their customers (dealers) felt about them and how they completely re-organized around their ‘true north’
Customer Success at Box (PDF)
Very insightful Preso with interesting Stats + . Here are their customer:CSM ratios:
100:1 (SMB)
65:1 (Midmarket)
35:1 (Enterprise)
They also mention that they had 71K customers so with above numbers it seems they will have at least 710 CSMs?? that somehow doesn’t sound right though.
Customer life-cycle (PDF)
Puts a nice structure around sales process. Good quick read.
How Coveo is using AI in Search (PDF)
Good overview of what they are doing
How Atlassian scaled its training program for > 68K customers (PDF)
A great reference material if you are trying to put together an education program for your own company. There are numerous studies (links coming shortly) that education/training program done right increases retention which is the bedrock for any SaaS enterprise.
Leading Churn Indicators (PDF)
Concise and precise list of such indicators.
How Apptio structured their Customer Success program (PDF)
I think they were the only ones who shared their CS implementation in fine detail. Excellent blueprint to refer to if you are thinking of designing your own CS program.
GainSight Company Summary & Why LightSpeed Invested (PDF)
Good read!
Gainsight use case (PDF)
Simple and easy-to-understand use cases for GainSight.
Email Outreach Using GainSight (PDF)
Presented by GainSight employees, it goes over their email outreach functionality.
Data Science@GainSight (PDF)
If you want to understand how the sausage is being made, good reference material.
Also, here are some interesting screenshots from above and other decks that I captured:
Interesting Slide Captures:
